


Hearth and Home

by notgrungybitchin



Category: Boardwalk Empire
Genre: Holidays, Lower East Side, M/M, Multi, New York, OT3: this is more like a family matter, Thanksgiving, Vignette
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-11-28
Updated: 2014-11-28
Packaged: 2018-02-26 23:13:34
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,594
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2669954
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/notgrungybitchin/pseuds/notgrungybitchin
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>On Thanksgiving 1921, Charlie, Meyer and Benny make their own holiday.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Hearth and Home

November 1921 had been warm -- at least that’s what the newspapers said. To Charlie it could never be warm enough. The heat of Mediterranean air never having fully left his blood, he always started to chill at the first hint of an autumn breeze. And all the years living on this country’s northeastern shore did nothing to make him used to it. He hardly remembered Sicily, but he never forgot the way air was supposed to feel. Cold and rainy was not it. The rooms above their poker game did little to keep out any chill. The day had dawned dark and rainy, and barely any light managed to break through before the early sunset.

Thanksgiving had fallen on exactly his birthday that year, and his mother had come to the rooms above the offices laden with food, dishes of pasta and chicken and a bottle of wine, and Charlie marveled again at how one woman could carry it all. They had never made much of Thanksgiving in his home, even before Hampton Farms. Sometimes, his mother would try to incorporate turkey, or at least chicken, into the meal on that Thursday. She’d make some halfhearted comment about them being real Americans after grace, and then it would pass. There was never anything in his siblings’ chattering or their crowded tenement table that suggested this meal was different from any other. But Charlie would notice his father’s face darken a little behind the eyes, and he would avoid him for the rest of the night. When he would venture out after dinner, the businesses on his block were all open. The neighborhood knew the holiday wasn’t really their own.

School tried to teach him what the day was all about, but he hardly understood until he’d stopped paying attention. Something about people who came here or discovered America or something? He was always confused because he thought that was Columbus. He didn’t bother to think it over too hard.

Charlie doesn’t know if his mother bothers with the turkey any more. He doesn’t ask.

“There’s extra,” she said. Placing the dishes on the table, quickly cleared of papers and ash trays by Charlie when she arrived. She looked around the room, for signs of Meyer or Benny, Charlie knew, and he was relieved they were busy downstairs. Rosalia tried her best to extend her love to Charlie’s friends, but it always felt a little out of place, and the hurt hidden in the back of her eyes whenever she was confronted with what she understood his business to be, and how his friends played into it, was too tangible. Charlie preferred to avoid it.

She didn’t stay for long, only sat and made sure he ate a little, asked some empty questions about how he was and how he was living -- easy things to answer without really answering. Then she was gone, and Charlie sat and smoked and stared at food that he had little appetite for. It was already pitch black outside, with the steady tapping of rain on the window growing into a downpour.

He heard footsteps outside in the hall, cocked his head and got up to check. Meyer was walking past the door toward the room that was theoretically his. It was mostly an office with an unused bed. He stopped and smiled slightly when he saw Charlie.

“It’s been quiet. I’m bringing down some more work.”

Charlie hadn’t seen Meyer all day. He’d slept late, the weather and the dark and the knowledge of his mother’s impending arrival lulling him into lethargy. When he’d woken it was afternoon and too drafty for him to want to leave his bed. Meyer never came upstairs last night, or at least not while Charlie was awake.

Charlie leaned on the door frame. “You should stay up here,” he smiled. It was all he wanted -- to celebrate by forgetting work for one day and just be with Meyer.

Meyer glanced down the stairs. “I told Benny I’d be back. He built a fire. Probably shouldn’t be left alone.”

Charlie knew how Meyer felt about fires. He saw the quiet worry in Meyer’s eyes that only he could recognize. “I’ll be right down,” he said, turning back into the room and stacking as much of the food into his arms as he could.

Meyer climbed back up the stairs as soon as he spotted Charlie struggling to balance four trays in his arms. He met him halfway and took two. “You didn’t plan this well.” Meyer shook his head, as Charlie wobbled, unsteady from the shift in weight.

They had a fireplace, grimy and rarely used. Benny was sitting on the floor in front of it, prodding a bonfire-like blaze with a poker. A log fell and set off a shower of sparks.

“Make sure that don’t get any bigger,” said Charlie as he put the food down on the floor some distance from the hearth. In the corner of his eye he saw Meyer gather up the papers from the desk and move them a little further away.

“ _Se brent nit,_ ” muttered Benny, and as he turned he spotted the food behind him. He dropped the poker and scooted along the floor close to it. “We got a chicken?” he asked, reaching in with his hands and grabbing a leg. “What’s the occa-- ” he asked through a full mouth before catching a glare from Meyer. “Oh shit yeah, how’s the birthday?”

Charlie shrugged. “Too quiet.”

“You wanna go out front, help Jake with the house?” Benny finished the chicken leg and tossed the bone on the ground. “He turned off the victorla,” he said, looking at Meyer with annoyance.

“You want to go back to work, you can turn it back on,” said Meyer, not looking up from his work.

Benny grumbled and grabbed another bite of chicken.

“You should eat, Mey,” said Charlie, “We gotta get rid of this.”

“I’ll take care of it,” said Benny, digging into the pasta with his hands now.

“Go get a fucking fork,” barked Charlie, pulling the tray away from Benny’s hands.

“ _Fine_ ,” Benny snapped.

He shot up and bolted out of the room, returning with his arms full of a stack of dusty glasses, a mishmash of cutlery, and two bottles of whiskey, pilfered from the house stock. He placed the selection on the ground before Charlie and starting stabbing at the chicken with a large knife.

Charlie opened a bottle and poured three glasses. Meyer set down his pen begrudgingly and walked over to join them. He took a sip of whiskey and surveyed the selection of dishes on the floor. He was deliberating something.  
  
"I was going to wait until later..." Meyer left the room and returned shortly with some packages of brown butcher paper. He unwrapped corned beef, rye, and sour pickles. He slid them toward Charlie. "Congratulations on another year."  
  
"Didn't think I'd make it?" Charlie laughed. This was the food he could really get excited about. Despite being surrounded by his mother's cooking, here at last were the flavors that felt like home. And even if all of it was always available down the street, eating the food of the neighborhood, on the floor, with Benny and Meyer, felt like a celebration.  
  
Benny reached over Charlie's arm and piled corned beef and a pickle onto his pasta. Charlie stared at the concoction in horror.  
  
"Benny," sighed Meyer, looking equally disturbed.  
   
"What? _Drai mir nit kain kop_."  
  
Meyer tilted his head to the side with an indulgent little look and opened a package of halva. Digging into a large block that was clearly only meant for him.

Benny cackled. “You’re one to talk, noshing on that shit.”

“Maybe you could say thanks for the food, ‘stead of bein’ an asshole about it?” snapped Charlie. His fondness for Meyer was not going to be dampened by Benny’s hocking. Especially not over a gift as precious as corned beef.

“I didn’t get it for Benny so…” said Meyer, looking toward Charlie for a moment before returning to his halva.

“Thanks Mey,” smiled Charlie, sliding a plate of corned beef toward his partner.

Meyer put the halva aside and dug into the corned beef, and together the three of them sat and ate as the fire settled to a sane size, befitting the small hearth.

Later, they would leave the back room and venture into the main house. Benny would burst in and turn on the Victrola, bounding up and down the stairs to the newest Al Jolson record. Meyer would relieve Jake and return to running the house, and Charlie, eschewing his other work, would stay at the Darner’s & Weaver’s all night.

In later years, Charlie would mark his birth with greater celebration -- champagne and girls and music. In the tumult of events to come, he forgot that one year, when two holidays were celebrated on a dusty floor, with cheap, common food and booze they should have saved for their patrons.

It was a scene they had shared before and would share again, nothing very noteworthy about it. But it was always in those moments, sitting together in dim light, that the future they were fighting for seemed so much more tangible. That November evening, as the nation celebrated a promise – one that Charlie, Meyer and Benny knew was never meant for them -- they felt the promise of what they could take together, for themselves, in back rooms and on street corners. A country for the family they had come to be.

**Author's Note:**

> Translations:
> 
> (I don't speak Yiddish, so Benny's usage may not be entirely correct. If so, I apologize and feel free to correct me if you know better.) 
> 
> \- Se brent nit: Don’t get overexcited (lit., it’s not burning!)
> 
> \- Drai mir nit kain kop: Don’t bother me! (lit., don’t twist my head)


End file.
